With All Souls Day coming, my office friends and I got to talking about how it’s best to be laid to rest because of course everyone thinks about such a stupid topic every once in a while when one nears middle age where one’s finally halfway done.

It was such a lively discussion about dying that I thought it best to continue an exposition of my opinions here on why it’s still better to be buried than to be cremated. It’s admittedly a very old argument like coffee vs tea, dogs vs cats, ice cream vs cake, or Brad Pitt vs Tom Cruise–timeless as it were and as old as there have been insufferable idiots in the world.

But enough with the introduction. I say it’s better for a person to be buried than to be cremated not because of any real religious reasons but because it’s what he or she deserves.

Get this: the best way to assess the value of most things in life is to quantify the human labor involved in producing them.

Thus, a hand-crafted car is way more expensive than your regular cookie cutter because there’s just so much more sweat and skill expended to create the commodity. To me, the same logic makes it very clear which between burying and cremation is ultimately and transcendentally more valuable.

With burying, you have a whole bunch of people worrying about which coffin to buy (and if there’s still something available your size without the funeral director having to hack away your legs to make you fit), an entire drama regarding the piece of land to purchase for your final resting place, and between those two just a crowd of people getting severely disrupted in their busy lives to do one thing or another with your lifeless body which doesn’t give a flying squirrel’s ass what’s happening around it.